My friend Mel called me last week to ask if I still had my Eisenhower jacket.

He needed the jacket to wear in some kind of Memorial Day ceremony planned in his neighborhood.

I couldn't help him. I remember wearing an Ike jacket back in 1945, which was my last year in the Army. But I don't recall getting home with it.

The reason Mel was calling around, some people who were once in military service keep their uniforms, for years and years. And a few are pleased that they can still wear them, on occasions such as Veterans Day or Memorial Day.

Even if I still had my WWII uniform, I'd rip the thing apart, top to bottom, if I tried to get back into it.

Mel couldn't wear it either. Since 1945 he's been eating at least as well as I have, and maybe a few pounds better.

The Eisenhower jacket? It was a shortened version of the old green U.S. Army dress coat, the bottom of which came down to about the middle of the soldier's behind. The Ike jacket stopped at his waist, and looked snug and slim and sharp.

I recall the Ike jacket being really popular among enlisted guys in the old Army Air Corps. You'd hear this: "Only thing better to wear would be a checkered sport coat and a ruptured duck." (Ruptured duck was the soldier's name for the insignia worn by discharged personnel.)

We used to hear a variety of stories on how the Eisenhower jacket got that name. One was, and I expect it's pretty close to right, that in the middle of WWII Dwight Eisenhower "requested" that the coat of the standard uniform be shortened.

Ike was then supreme commander of all Allied Forces in the European Theater of War, and when he sent forth a request, it was received as an order. My guess is, if the notion had struck him, he could have had us fighting in short skirts.

On my blog, I recently mentioned GI shoes, and I heard from a vet who still has the pair Uncle Sam issued him in the '40s. Wears them when he goes deer hunting, along with a set of GI leggings. Cleans them after every wearing, and keeps them in a special zippered case.

You need to be born with a special take-care-of-it gene to do things like that. I was behind the door when they passed out that gene.

Too bad, because I was one of the few soldiers who liked wearing GI shoes. Sure, they were big and heavy and looked like the clodhoppers Li'l Abner wore in the funnies. But somehow my feet got along fine with GI shoes.

I even wore them on bombing missions. In WWII, we already had electrically heated suits. But on those B-24s we flew, sometimes the suits were bad about not working, especially down at the feet. Climb up there at high altitude, and your tootsies could be frostbitten without some kind of protection.

But with an extra pair of socks, GI shoes worked fine. On an eight-hour mission, most of myself sometimes stayed cold, but my feet? Never.

I was wearing those shoes when they handed me my ruptured duck in November of '45, and I still had them when I went to work for the Houston Post in '47. I often wore them on the job, which daily took me out in the boonies. Some of my colleagues used to gig me about those clodhoppers, but I'd tell 'em they were my favorite footwear because they had kept my toes from getting frozen off.

Well, I started out today to write a Memorial Day column, honoring those who died fighting wars. But I have strayed off the trail, and I apologize. This happens sometimes.

Get a couple of old veterans together and pretty soon they're talking not so much about fighting a war but more likely about what they had to eat, or to wear, or to read, or to put up with.

For instance, that phone conversation I had, with my friend Mel? It started out on Ike jackets but before we hung up we'd discussed GI shoes, field jackets, helmet liners, slit trenches, second lieutenants, poker games, mail call, first sergeants, three-day passes and olive drab underwear.

I hated OD underwear. No matter how many times you washed it, it always looked dirty.